It was the same with the cereals;
wheat and maize sprouted and ripened as if by magic,
and for a while a rank and luxuriant pasturage clothed
the meadows. Summer and autumn seemed blended into one.
If Captain Servadac had been more deeply versed in astronomy,
he would perhaps have been able to bring to bear his knowledge
that if the axis of the earth, as everything seemed to indicate,
now formed a right angle with the plane of the ecliptic,
her various seasons, like those of the planet Jupiter, would become
limited to certain zones, in which they would remain invariable.
But even if he had understood the _rationale_ of the change,
the convulsion that had brought it about would have been as much
a mystery as ever.

The precocity of vegetation caused some embarrassment.
The time for the corn and fruit harvest had fallen simultaneously
with that of the haymaking; and as the extreme heat precluded
any prolonged exertions, it was evident "the population"
of the island would find it difficult to provide the necessary
amount of labor. Not that the prospect gave them much concern:
the provisions of the gourbi were still far from exhausted,
and now that the roughness of the weather had so happily subsided,
they had every encouragement to hope that a ship of some sort
would soon appear. Not only was that part of the Mediterranean
systematically frequented by the government steamers that watched
the coast, but vessels of all nations were constantly cruising
off the shore.

In spite, however, of all their sanguine speculations, no ship appeared.
Ben Zoof admitted the necessity of extemporizing a kind of parasol
for himself, otherwise he must literally have been roasted to death
upon the exposed summit of the cliff.

Meanwhile, Servadac was doing his utmost--it must be acknowledged,
with indifferent success--to recall the lessons of his school-days. He
would plunge into the wildest speculations in his endeavors to unravel
the difficulties of the new situation, and struggled into a kind of conviction
that if there had been a change of manner in the earth's rotation on her axis,
there would be a corresponding change in her revolution round the sun,
which would involve the consequence of the length of the year being either
diminished or increased.

Independently of the increased and increasing heat, there was another
very conclusive demonstration that the earth had thus suddenly
approximated towards the sun. The diameter of the solar disc
was now exactly twice what it ordinarily looks to the naked eye;
in fact, it was precisely such as it would appear to an observer
on the surface of the planet Venus. The most obvious inference
would therefore be that the earth's distance from the sun
had been diminished from 91,000,000 to 66,000,000 miles.
If the just equilibrium of the earth had thus been destroyed,
and should this diminution of distance still continue,
would there not be reason to fear that the terrestrial world
would be carried onwards to actual contact with the sun,
which must result in its total annihilation?

The continuance of the splendid weather afforded Servadac
every facility for observing the heavens. Night after night,
constellations in their beauty lay stretched before his eyes--
an alphabet which, to his mortification, not to say his rage,
he was unable to decipher. In the apparent dimensions of
the fixed stars, in their distance, in their relative position
with regard to each other, he could observe no change.
Although it is established that our sun is approaching the
constellation of Hercules at the rate of more than 126,000,000
miles a year, and although Arcturus is traveling through space
at the rate of fifty-four miles a second--three times faster
than the earth goes round the sun,--yet such is the remoteness
of those stars that no appreciable change is evident to the senses.
The fixed stars taught him nothing.

Far otherwise was it with the planets. The orbits of Venus and Mercury
are within the orbit of the earth, Venus rotating at an average distance
of 66,130,000 miles from the sun, and Mercury at that of 35,393,000.
After pondering long, and as profoundly as he could, upon these figures,
Captain Servadac came to the conclusion that, as the earth was now receiving
about double the amount of light and heat that it had been receiving
before the catastrophe, it was receiving about the same as the planet Venus;
he was driven, therefore, to the estimate of the measure in which the earth
must have approximated to the sun, a deduction in which he was confirmed
when the opportunity came for him to observe Venus herself in the splendid
proportions that she now assumed.